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How to Master Night Shift on Your iPhone and iPad

Night Shift mode, available in iOS 9.3 is Apple’s way of saving your eyes from yourself. It’s no secret that a lot of people use their iPhones and iPads in bed, right before falling asleep. Even if you turn the brightness all the way down, you’re still looking at a relatively bright screen. Apple, in collaboration with Science, is here to make things right.

So How Do I Use This Thing?

Good question. Unlike something like Live Photos, Night Shift isn’t turned on by default. You’ll have to enable it.

Once you’ve upgraded to iOS 9.3, you’ll see a new icon in the bottom row of Control Center. It looks a bit like the Sun, emitting rays. It’s surely better than the icon they had during the beta, a creepy looking eye icon. And people say Apple doesn’t change!

When you tap it, Night Shift mode will turn on. Tap it again and it will turn off. Yup, it’s as simple as that.

Also, you should know that Night Shift mode doesn’t work if your iOS device is in Low Power Mode.

Can’t I Customize It?

Yes you can. The shortcut in Control Center is just so you can turn it on and off whenever you want. There’s also a way to put this thing on a schedule. And I suggest you do that.

To do that we’ll need to go to “Settings” -> “Display & Brightness” -> “Night Shift”.

Here you’ll see the “Scheduled” option. Turn it on.

You’ll now see a new menu. This will let you choose what time you want Night Shift mode to work. By default, the time for me is 10 PM to 7 AM (this is based on the sunset in your region). But you can tap it to change the schedule.

Now Night Shift will turn itself on and off at the given time, you don’t need to worry about it.

What’s This “Manually Enable Until Tomorrow” Business?

Right below the “Schedule” option, you’ll see something called “Manually Enable Until Tomorrow”.

This option is the carbon copy of the Night Shift option in Control Center.

Let’s say it’s 4 PM, you’re in the cinema, but you want to turn on Night Shift, you tap this option (or better, the Night Shift icon in Control Center) and Night Shift mode will be enabled. Until the next morning that is.

The wording of this feature is a bit weird. Because only if you are using the Schedule feature that Night Shift will disable itself by 7 AM next morning. If you’re not, it should theoretically keep working forever. Weird, I know.

The gist is, enable the Schedule feature and if you need to use Night Shift in the day time, just use the Control Center to enable it.

How Warm Is Too Warm?

The last option in the Night Shift settings screen lets you tune the intensity of the tint. Apple calls it warmth.

The default in the warmth-o-meter is smack in the middle, at 50%. You can slide it to the left to make it less warm (more eye piercing white and bright), or slide it to the right to make it warmer (more soothing orange tint).

I’ve personally kept the slider at around 65%, 15% leaning towards the warmth. But this would, of course, depend, person to person.

Can I Get This on Other Devices?

Once you’re used to the soothing orange glow in the night, other devices, with their piercing white light are going to get unbearable. Good news is that Apple neither invented, nor has patented this idea (shocking, I know). So this feature is available basically everywhere (even in your browser).

On Mac or Windows, just download f.lux (f.lux has a great connection with Apple, more on that in a bit).

Even on Android, you can get third party apps like Twilight to do this.

Trivia: Night Shift History Lesson

So now that we’re done with the important stuff, it’s story time! Just like your favorite superhero, the Night Shift origin story is fascinating and filled with betrayal, love and probably sex.

I’ll just give you the highlights.

f.lux came up with a frankly genius way to sideload its own screen tinting app on iPhone without the need for jailbreaking. (You needed to download Xcode and basically “build” the app for your specific phone but that’s just a minor aside).

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